ont of the high
altar. Perhaps, if one who loved Amadeo were bidden to point out
his masterpiece, he would lead the way at once to this. The space is
small: yet it includes the whole tragedy of the Passion. Christ is
lying dead among the women on his mother's lap, and there are pitying
angels in the air above. One woman lifts his arm, another makes her
breast a pillow for his head. Their agony is hushed, but felt in
every limb and feature; and the extremity of suffering is seen in each
articulation of the worn and wounded form just taken from the cross.
It would be too painful, were not the harmony of art so rare, the
interlacing of those many figures in a simple round so exquisite. The
noblest tranquillity and the most passionate emotion are here fused in
a manner of adorable naturalness.

From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded
with sunlight, where the swallows skim, and the brown hawks circle,
and the mason bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings.
The arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard
terra-cotta. The memory fails before such infinite invention, such
facility and felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding round
the arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows
of angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling and
some grave, ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saints
stationary on their pedestals, and faces leaning from the rounds
above; crowds of cherubs, and courses of stars, and acanthus leaves in
woven lines, and ribands incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then,
over all, the rich red light and purple shadows of the brick, than
which no substance sympathises more completely with the sky of solid
blue above, the broad plain space of waving summer grass beneath our
feet.

It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes, the train will take
us back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and
strained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery
wall. Through that grey-green leafage, young with early spring,
the pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. The
rice-fields are under water, far and wide, shining like burnished
gold beneath the level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking;
those persistent frogs, whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye,
in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the
water-snakes, the busy rats,